Researcher

Investigator

Researcher Dr. Joseph B. Margolick of Johns Hopkins University said such an approach "could help improve surveillance for HIV infection in areas where HIV is relatively common and this, in turn, would help people have access to treatments to HIV that could greatly improve their health."

"We believe urine-based testing may be at least one useful tool for identifying people who have HIV infection, but don't want to have a blood test," investigator Dr. Joseph B. Margolick of The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore told Reuters Health.

Margolick and colleagues hypothesized that convenient, noninvasive methods of screening in high-risk areas "could detect many HIV-infected individuals who otherwise would not be tested."

To investigate the usefulness of urine testing in this regard, over a period of about three years, the researchers screened more than 1,700 people at one- to two-day sessions held in places such as churches, food kitchens and community halls as well as at ongoing testing sites.

Overall, 210 (12%) people were HIV-positive.Of these, 169 (80%) had never been tested before or had had negative test results.Blood testing in a subset of 86 people who showed positive results on both the standard HIV blood test and a urine test for HIV antibodies confirmed the findings in 83 (97%) of them.

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Margolick added that such an approach "could help improve surveillance for HIV infection in areas where HIV infection is relatively common, and this in turn would help people have access to treatments for HIV that could greatly improve their health."

The article was authored by Emily A. Sloan of UVA; Mary F. Kearney of the National Cancer Institute; Laurie R. Gray of UVA; Kathryn Anastos of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Eric S. Daar of the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center; Joseph Margolick of Johns Hopkins; Frank Maldarelli of the National Cancer Institute; and Hammarskjold and Rekosh.

"Nobody knew where the answers were going to come from," said Joseph Margolick, a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and head of the Baltimore branch of the four-city study. (Other clinical sites are in Los Angeles, Chicago and Pittsburgh.) When he joined the study in the 1980s, Margolick was a young researcher with a keen interest in unraveling the mystery behind the seemingly invincible virus.